At the end of his new memoir All the Wrong Moves, a chronicle of his addiction to the game, Chapin lays out a final judgment on chess: “I would cautiously recommend (it),” he writes, “just like I would cautiously recommend any temporarily pleasurable experience that might encase you completely, eclipsing all of your other concerns, leaving you useless to the generally kludgy grinding of civilization, to the mealy pleasantness of everyday acquaintance.”

He loves chess. But he fears it, too.

It takes a powerful personality to resist the obsessive influence of chess addition once it’s begun to creep up. In his early novel The Defense, Vladimir Nabokov has a doctor speak of chess as “a cold amusement that dries up and corrupts the brain,” before cautioning the protagonist, an erratic grandmaster named Luzhin, that “horror, suffering, (and) despair” are the only things “this exhausting game gives rise to.”

All the Wrong Moves.Penguin Random House

Chapin’s monomania started late, by the standards of chess — a game that, like music and mathematics, is a field of child prodigies, of adolescent geniuses and preschool masterminds. Chapin got into it in a serious way in high school where, as a student at an academy of “alternative” education, playing chess was, unusually, “cool and conspicuous,” an act of “counter-counter-culture” that he found both engrossing and “socially useful.” An outsider at a school rife with them, he was attracted to chess for the way in which it involved “both self-expression and self-effacement.”

Like many intelligent people who discover a latent talent, Chapin initially savours his triumphs over other people, delighting in the opportunity to prove his supremacy as he smashes his “brain directly against someone else’s.” Also like many intelligent people who discover a latent talent for chess, he soon learns that he discovered it too late. “If you want to be a world-class chess player,” he explains, sardonic with resentment, “you should start really, really young and be really, really lucky with your genetics.” He quotes a magazine study from 2014, which shows that “only 26 per cent of individual variance in skill level can be attributed to practice.” The oft-cited “10,000 rule” — that 10,000 hours of practice can make someone an expert in any given field — simply isn’t applicable to this game. As Chapin puts it: “You either have it, or you don’t.”

Thisisn’t a book about someone who has it. It’s a book about someone who doesn’t have it, but wishes they did. As All the Wrong Moves makes clear, any kind of serious, history-making achievement in the field of chess isn’t feasible for a 20-something magazine writer from Toronto — and so Chapin wisely doesn’t dream of becoming the next Bobby Fischer. “I couldn’t become a grandmaster, or a master at all,” he concedes early in the book. “Becoming a surgeon was more likely. Becoming a frog was more likely.” Instead he sets a plausible but still ambitious goal, the pursuit of which is the book’s driving force: “I would beat a player whose rating was at least 2000.”

To convey the seriousness of his objective, Chapin is obliged to explain a great deal about the World Chess Federation and its numerical grading system, about how points are awarded and taken away. This brings him close to the heart of an obsession that’s more interesting at a remove, and it is a relief when he begins to participate in chess tournaments in earnest, approaching them from the perspective of an intrigued journalist rather than a twitchy insider. These high-stakes games — “mostly inglorious little affairs conducted in church basements on weekends” — form the drama of the book, as he squares off against the glum oddballs and “nervous-looking 12-year-olds” of the international chess circuit.

Faced with the problem of how to describe a game that would be boring for an ordinary person to watch, let alone hear about, he turns to irony and self-deprecation.

It takes a determined writer, clear-minded and strong-willed, to write about chess with the distance and clarity required to make it interesting. Chapin proves up to it. He has a playful outlook and a dry sense of humour, and this insulates him against the more esoteric and, frankly, boring aspects of his subject. Faced with the problem of how to describe a game that would be boring for an ordinary person to watch, let alone hear about, he turns to irony and self-deprecation.

Here is how Chapin sets up his fifth tournament game, against “Rough Gus,” a “weird, weird kid” who, for the majority of the game, “stared at a bottle of iced tea, which he swirled around until it frothed”:

“The thing about being beaten by a little kid is, like, I’m better than a little kid, right? Any impartial observer would have to agree that I am superior to nearly any 10-year-old. While I’m maybe not as cherubic or delicate, I am more tough, useful, steadfast, reasonable, caring, intelligent, precise and voluminous. Most children can’t lift 300 lbs, as I can. Painful years have abraded the superfluities of my personality. Come over sometime and I’ll cook a fantastic meal as long as you bring the wine I suggest. Only an idiot or a pervert would want to hang out with Rough Gus, my opponent, instead of me.”

The comedy often feels like Chapin’s effort to reassert himself in the face of a subject with the power to dwarf and totalize, as though to remind the reader that Chapin, unlike many other, less fortunate chess players, has remained at least somewhat sane and sober before the influence of obsession. “The joy of playing your favourite game is matched by the constant pain of knowing how badly you’re playing it,” Chapin reflects in the middle of the book, “such that every game you play is like vigorously stabbing yourself with your favourite knife.”

His experience with chess is not extraordinary, ultimately. He doesn’t achieve greatness or any particular notoriety as a player, and his relationship with the game, while perhaps unhealthy, is severed before it goes too far — before it took too much from him, as it took from Bobby Fischer, Nabokov’s Luzhin and Marcel Duchamp.

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At 31, Duchamp, wealthy and famous, “gave up being one of the great shit-stirrers of the artistic tradition, and ended up being a mild curiosity in the history of chess,” as Chapin relates in the book. He abandoned art for chess, for a chess obsession; “never excellent,” he “was just skilled enough to win some small potatoes regional tournaments.” The fixation destroyed his marriage and ruined his career. Chapin sees in this story a kind of parable, and draws for the reader a moral:

“But in chess, of course, there is no pageantry — none of the pompousness that Duchamp’s work tried to skewer. One can’t speculate about whether a chess move is honest or dishonest. Chess can’t be pretentious, or self-serious. It’s just not that kind of thing. It’s simpler than all of that. It is what it is.”

For Chapin, this is essential to the game’s appeal. He writes of himself, throughout the book, as “a dancing bear,” performing for the admiration and approval of others. He writes of “feeling that the project of my being had been given failing marks by some invisible and final council,” and that, in school and later, “I was constantly suppressing the silent terror that, at any moment, the ruse of my charm would disappear.” All the Right Moves is a book about living and breathing chess, and about the danger chess can pose to those receptive to its charms, unable to resist its allure. It’s also a book about chess’s beautiful truth: “You can’t fake chess.”